Asha Anujeeva

Contribution by Saul Martin

I try really hard to be an example for my children, and to show them the importance of saving money. We have a “coupon clipping hour” every Sunday afternoon, where we all gather around the table and cut out our coupons for the week. We make our grocery list based on what’s on sale, and we’ve turned it in to a little game. The person who can make the most creative meal plan with the fewest amount of ingredients wins. Bonus points if all of those items are on sale, and extra bonus points if the meal ends up being delicious. I think it does a lot to really instill the value of money in them, and we actually all have a lot of fun every Sunday sitting around the table together. I was talking to a friend recently though who convinced me that saving money is not only about clipping coupons. It’s about making wiser choices with your money across the board. She even called shop electric companies in texas to see if she could get a more affordable energy provider, and she ended up saving a ton of money. I wonder if I could convince one of my kids to make the call for me…they really love to save money!

For years I’ve been hearing on television shows, and from my own doctors, that taking one low-dose aspirin a day helps to prevent heart attacks.  For the most part I haven’t taken aspirin at all because it irritates my stomach.  It irritates my stomach BIG TIME!  And I know that the so-called “prevention” factor is that it acts as a blood thinner.  Ibuprofen ALSO acts as a blood thinner, and relieves my headaches better than other pain killers.  I tend to take a couple of ibuprofen almost every day, so I figure that the advice to take one aspirin a day really does not apply to me.

Today I was reading an article on the Time.com website that a study done in England has concluded that aspirin does not reduce the risk of heart attacks in people who are prone to be diabetic.  Well, I think that news is going to shake up the medical community!  I wonder what I’m going to be hearing on the television news (and from the doctors) NOW!

Have you ever wished that your employer would provide a company uniform for employees to wear at the companies expense? And by that I don’t mean a vest to wear, I mean an entire outfit, shirt, shoes, pants, the whole nine yards. Life would be so much easier if I could simply obtain a work outfit from http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/categories/Scrubs/Scrubs-for-Women/ and have the company reimburse for the expense. Scrubs are both modest and comfortable to wear. If everyone wore a uniform to work, you would never be having to suffer the bad taste of the person who wears their skirts or shorts way too short and their shirts way too low in the neck.

I know that a lot of people would object, saying that they want the freedom to choose what they wear, to be able to express their individuality, but I think it would be a great benefit for people to not have to spend a lot of money on work clothes. It would be even better if the company had a uniform laundry service. My uncle used to work as an automobile mechanic in a well known shop and his company provided the mechanics with work clothes and even had them laundered. I think that would be a wonderful benefit to have, don’t you?

I was reading in the time.com health and science section that an accidental discovery by scientists have left them with new knowledge that may prove helpful in predicting future earthquakes!  They were measuring how barometric pressure effected underground changes and discovered that there were changes shortly before a couple of earthquakes happened!  So the scientists are thinking that they may be able to use this technology to help predict earthquakes and give residents advance warning to get to safer places.  This is really big news and I’m surprised that I didn’t hear it on television news!

Thanks for the guest post by Susan Dorman

When my husband decided to surprise me with the birthday gift of one of those upright style commercial vacuum cleaners I exclaimed that it was the best birthday gift I had ever received, he looked at me quite skeptically. “It is?” he queried. “Well, yes of course it is” I replied. “When you give me a tool for floor care it means that you are going to take on the chore, and I can’t think of a better gift than for you to take on the carpet cleaning chore.

Well, what could the poor man say after that? He said “well, I wasn’t planning on taking on the vacuuming.” My reply was “then you should not have bought me a vacuum cleaner! I was perfectly happy with the cannister style vacuum that I have owned since before we met and the upright styles are too hard for me to push back and forth, so if you expect our carpets to be vacuumed with that, then YOU are going to be the one to do the vacuuming.”

Well he hemmed and he hawed and said that it was easy to use the upright vacuum, much easier than using the cannister style. So I told him that was great news because HE was going to be the one using it. Well, he tried to put on his best game face and he DID use it to vacuum the floors for about a month. Then he declared that it was, in fact, harder to use than the cannister style vacuum and he put in out in the garage, never to be used again. Until, of course, we broke up and I kept the cannister style vacuum!  And when it came time that my cannister style vacuum broke down I ended up buying another cannister style vacuum. The upright ones are just too hard to use!